I’m happy to have contributed to the process. As George Lucas has so, er, ably demonstrated, no movie is ever “done.”

One of the reasons I only rarely sent out screeners of Lady Magdalene’s to reviewers was that I knew the movie needed more work before commercial distribution. This past month film-editor Kent Hastings and myself went back into the editing bay for several weeks and produced what we’re calling the “Special Preview” edition, which is being shown this coming Saturday in the events center of the Pahrump Nugget Hotel and Gambling Hall (one of our shooting locations during principal photography back in 2006) and this is the edition that will be released as a DVD available on Amazon.com in September, along with a two-disc CD, Lady Magdalene’s: the musical soundtrack. Still going through the proofing process on these so can’t give you a firm release date.

You might be interested that in this new cut I was aware of the critiques you and others made and kept them in mind while recutting. We restructured the narrative flow of the movie, added back in some scenes I missed and cut some scenes I no longer thought worked, and added a whole bunch more deleted and expanded scenes — plus bloopers — to the end credits sequence.

I think the new edition is better as both a straight suspense film and is funnier than the version you reviewed. I specifically put more of the “fish out of water” scenes back in.

We also improved and finished some of our digital composite work.

Overall, I’d say I’m not 95% of where this movie can be without actually going back and reshooting — which I don’t have the budget to do.

Thought you and your readers should know, and keep your eyes on the official website at http://www.ladymagdalenes.com for further updates.

Cheers!

Neil

In the fifth screenshot, Goldwater looks like David Boreanaz!

I don’t mind a bad review based on an honest disagreement with the producers’ intents, but when someone makes it his or her purpose in life to set forth a tissue of lies about a movie not yet in distribution and attempts to make sure no one else will ever get a chance to see it so they can possibly disagree with this anonymous guardian of public taste, it’s time for this louse to put up or shut up.

Who the hell are you, RARanieri? Have you ever done anything creative yourself? Ever put yourself out there in front of an audience or a readership? Ever worked years to learn a craft? Ever suffered through more rejections you can count before you made a sale … and did it again for the next project … and had to prove yourself again each time you did something new?

I’ll bet you haven’t. Nobody can go through that experience without developing a respect for the peers who simply manage to survive the brutality of exposing your inner soul every time you work, and managing not to get beaten down by god damned liars like you.

Come back here, you creep, and fight like a man.

As it is I hope to see an audio commentary track or two.

Okay. I just sent Nathan the script and budget for my next project. :-)

Neil

As I said (and writing my comment late at night I was bleary-eyed and my typing sucked) I wish there were a way to cut a movie without having to worry about labels like “comedy” or “action” and let the Zen of the movie’s natural elements let it find the audience that will appreciate it for what it is rather than what the labels lead them to expect. These category expectations are the death of originality and instead of getting new art you get paint-by-numbers.

I have straight and comedic elements all the way through the movie. I have laugh lines in my most serious scenes; I have serious scenes in the beginning and comedy scenes in the end.

I call the movie a “suspense comedy” because that’s the least offensive label I can think of to convey this to a potential audience. But I wish I could just tell the audience, This movie tells what its writer/director considers to be a pretty decent story. We have suspense. We have some decent action — as much as we could afford on an ultra-low budget. (No use of stock footage by the way, and I bet you’d be wrong in identifying precisely what and where we composited, since all of our action was shot as real stunts without green screens.) We have a romance. We have music. We have a happy ending. If the movie was shot to any formula it was the kitchen-sink approach of old studio movies — the formula still used in Bollywood.

Is that a “comedy”? Is that an “action movie”? These terms are ephemeral. To Shakespeare’s audience a comedy ended with a wedding and a tragedy ended in a funeral. Why must any movie be judged by how well what it actually is fits into the pigeonhole of a marketing label?

Neil